When nonviolent action is the last resort

Against a repressive government, nonviolent action can often
be more effective than violence. A new book surveys how the switch from armed
to nonviolent resistance can occur. Book review.

Brigades of Zapatistas reconstruct school destroyed by paramilitary groups. Demotix/ Debora Poo Soto. All rights reserved.Imagine that you live in a country
with a repressive government, such as South Africa under apartheid or Burma
under the generals. You are part of a resistance movement, seeking to overthrow
the government or to obtain independence for your oppressed people. What is the
best way to go about it? Diplomatic efforts, education, protest, noncooperation
or armed struggle?

Research shows that a movement
using primarily nonviolent action — methods such as rallies, strikes, boycotts
and alternative government — is more likely to be effective than armed
struggle. So you choose to join a nonviolent movement. So far so good. But
there’s a complication. There’s already an active armed movement with the same
goals as you, and you think this movement’s violent acts are hurting the
resistance. The government calls them ‘terrorists’ and uses their violence as a
pretext for arrests, torture, killing and removal of freedoms. Your nonviolent
movement is paying part of the price. So you set yourself a task. You want to
convince members of the armed opposition to switch to a strategy built around
nonviolent action. How do you go about it?

Dudouet has found authors to write
on eight prominent contemporary cases in which movements have switched from
armed to nonviolent methods: Western Sahara, West Papua, Palestine, South
Africa, Chiapas, Colombia, Egypt and Nepal. Few of these stories are known to
the wider public. Perhaps only the struggles in Palestine and South Africa are
familiar through the mass media, and even in these cases the transition from
armed to nonviolent methods is little known. So here is a valuable compendium
of insights about a crucially important process that has escaped the notice of
scholars and members of the public alike.

The first important insight is that
nonviolent action can be a method of choice for resistance struggles. The usual
assumption until now has been that armed struggle is a last resort, to be
undertaken when other methods don’t work, or when the regime is so repressive
that nonviolent action can’t possibly be successful. Throw this assumption out
the window! A replacement assumption is that there is no such thing as a last resort,
but instead that different approaches need to be examined on their merits in
particular circumstances. Sometimes, indeed often, armed struggle fails and
movements gain by shifting to nonviolent struggle. No doubt there are cases in
which movements can benefit by shifting to conventional politics; they would be
the topic for a different book.

The second insight from Dudouet’s
book is that transitions from armed to nonviolent struggle are nearly always
complex and messy. It’s possible to imagine a simple process in which activists
sit down and say, “Our approach isn’t working. Let’s switch to one more likely
to be effective.” Actually, a couple of the cases studies start something like
this. In Egypt, the leaders of the Islamic Group (IG) decided to change their
methods. However, they didn’t say this was because armed struggle wasn’t
working. They actually provided sophisticated theological justifications.
Furthermore, a movement doesn’t suddenly change its approach on the say-so of
leaders. IG leaders embarked on a systematic process of talking to the rank and
file, explaining and justifying their decision and eventually persuading most
movement members.

However, this was just one of
several paths to nonviolent struggle. In Mexico, the Zapatistas grew out of an
armed movement and fully expected that when they launched the rebellion in Chiapas
on 1 January 1994, people across the country would rise up and overthrow the
Mexican government. Of course it didn’t happen. The Zapatistas received great
support from within Chiapas and also, unexpectedly, from sympathisers
throughout the world. Within a matter of days, pressures from the base — the
people in Chiapas — pushed the Zapatistas to change to a nonviolent strategy:
they retained their arms but did not use them.

What is striking in this case is
the pragmatism of the Zapatistas: seeing the response of their local and
international constituency, and the lack of a country-wide insurgency, they
promptly jettisoned their beliefs about the necessity of armed struggle,
grounded in Marxism-Leninism, and adopted beliefs grounded in nonviolent action
and local empowerment.

As Guiomar Rovira Sancho, author of
the chapter on the Zapatistas, puts it:

The Zapatista
uprising encountered immense support, which gave rise to an extensive
solidarity network. It was evident that the armed strategy put all civil allies
at risk and that, at the military level, the correlation of forces, once the
moment of surprise was over, was totally negative for the EZLN. Their only way
to survive was to take advantage of the support coming from civil society and
to continue their struggle through negotiation and political means. (p. 144)

Each case in Civil Resistance and Conflict Transformation involves multiple
players, a range of influences and varying strategies. In order to make some
sense of this potentially confusing diversity, Dudouet asks each contributor to
examine factors relevant to understanding the transition. At the level of the
movement pushing for social change, two factors are the role of the leadership
and the negotiations and struggles within the movement itself. At the level of
society, factors include pressures from allies, the possibility of building
coalitions, learning from campaigns by other groups, and competition with other
movements. Then there are factors at the level of the country, such as state
repression and inducement, and international factors, such as allies, emulation
and acquisition of skills.

Each of the contributors followed
this framework, with the result that the book as a whole has an exemplary level
of coherence. If you are looking for an understanding of the transition
dynamics in a particular country, such as West Papua or Nepal, you can turn to
the relevant chapter. If you are looking to understand the transition process
more generally, Dudouet’s introduction and conclusion serve as admirable
guides.

In some cases, the actions of western
governments have served to undermine transitions to unarmed resistance. The US
government, for example, continued to classify groups in Egypt and Western
Sahara as terrorist many years after they had rejected armed struggle. Dudouet,
in drawing some conclusions, notes that policy-makers should better recognise
the possibility of transitions and support them.

This, however, assumes that western
governments actually prefer opposition movements to be nonviolent. If
nonviolent movements are more effective, perhaps some governments intuitively
prefer to provoke violence because this plays into the government’s hands,
justifying its own superior violence and strengthening its grip on power.
Although in some cases, most prominently South Africa, western governments
supported a push for change, governments were often the last to join the
campaign.

Perhaps in the future, when many
more cases have been studied and frameworks for understanding transitions have
been refined, there will be a simple guide on the vital topic of movements
switching from armed to nonviolent strategies.

For now, Civil Resistance and Conflict Transformation is the essential
source. It shows that transforming conflicts towards nonviolent struggles is
usually a complex and challenging process. Most importantly, it is possible.

About the author

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of
Wollongong, Australia and vice president of Whistleblowers Australia. He is the
author of 14 books and hundreds of articles on dissent, nonviolence, scientific
controversies, democracy and other topics. His website can be found here.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Download the free People Power mobile app for iPhone and iPod and get access to all of ICNC's educational and research materials on civil resistance, information on its latest activities and news on nonviolent conflicts and struggles around the world.

New Global Ferment

In November 2011 Jack DuVall introduced a special guest week of articles on the theme of Civil Resistance and the New Global Ferment. The articles are below:

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.